Knowledge Transfer With Telekom Austria

InfoLab21 researchers have been to Vienna to deliver the first of a series of workshops for Telekom Austria (TA).

Dr. Paul Smith from the Computing Department is being funded by Telekom Austria (the Austrian equivalent of BT) to carry out research on Resilient Next Generation Networks (NGNs).

He explained the aims of the project: "We are trying to make networked systems more robust by engineering them so they are resistant to challenges like component failures, mobility, and weak connectivity in wireless networks.

"Furthermore, we're interested in making systems more resilient to attacks, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, where vast "BotNets" aim to exhaust the resources of networked services."

Alongside this research programme, a series of knowledge transfer workshops is planned. The first workshop delivered by Adam Lindsay, a Research Fellow in the Computing Department, was about MPEG-7 and -21, which are standards for describing content, and Digital Rights Management (DRM), which is a significant issue for TA and others. TA has a successful trial where communities can share user generated content (UGC), such as local news, via their IPTV offering. DRM is a primary concern in this context.

Speaking about the workshop, Paul said "TA were very happy with the workshop and felt they gained a lot from it, so they have been left encouraged and wanting more. In the near future, experts from TA will visit us again to give a presentation on their UGC experiences. And hopefully, as well as the resilience thread, we will be able to do something with them in the UGC space and relate that to our Digital Rights Management work."

The next workshop of the series is being given by Dr. Mark Rouncefield in the area of Human Computer Interaction, and is pencilled in for mid-April.

The Resilient Next Generation Networks project is being led by Prof. David Hutchison. The project highlights the important role InfoLab21 is playing in the future of big technology led businesses such as TA.

Tue 04 March 2008

Associated Links

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